Zelig (1983)

When Woody Allen inserted himself into the newsreels of the 1920s, he accomplished something technically audacious and thematically modest. Zelig is a mockumentary about a man who becomes whoever stands beside him, a human chameleon whose pathology is really an exaggeration of ordinary social survival. The bluescreen work remains seamless, the scratches and crinkles on the negatives are convincing, and the parade of talking heads (Sontag, Bellow, Bettelheim) lends the absurd premise an air of sober authority. It is a formal triumph in service of a small, sad joke.

Assessed against the social concerns of the present day, the film is a relic, and contentedly so. Dr. Eudora Fletcher is a competent psychiatrist and the story's moral center, but her competence is a plot necessity, not a statement about patriarchy. Zelig's brief turns as a Black jazz trumpeter and an Asian man are punchlines about assimilation, not explorations of racial identity. A fraudulent businessman turns Zelig into a carnival attraction and a merchandise line, which is a jab at celebrity commerce and not a systemic indictment of capital. The psychiatric apparatus (hypnosis, electroconvulsive therapy) treats the condition as a curiosity. There is no environmental conscience here, no body politics, no revisionist reading of the historical record, and the archival impersonations exist to amuse.

The intellectuals do comment at length, but their commentary is the joke, delivered with a straight face by people who are in on the absurdity. The film lectures, yes, but it lectures about conformity, and it does so with a smirk. Pauline Kael complained there were no characters, only a conceit. She was half right. What remains is a precise, melancholy machine for producing laughs at the expense of a man with no self at all.